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“... slim. John Gielgud was once telling me about Mrs Simpson and how smart she was. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘she’d have made a disastrous queen. Didn’t go to the theatre at all.’ 19 January. Alan Bates opens tonight at the Barbican in the RSC production of Antony and Cleopatra. The version put on at Stratford opened with Antony making love to ...”

“... be disappointed on opening the book, which succeeds in spite of itself and the line it takes. Edward Garnett told Lawrence that The White Peacock had every fault known to the English novel but that its author had genius. Elizabeth Smart was not a genius: but she is the rare case of a writer who succeeds by writing as if she were one. She succeeded in her ...”

“... think of anything to say,’ thus Karl Kraus in a famous aside in 1935. But a great deal has been said about him ever since and no one has been better at saying it than Alan Bullock. His Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, published in 1952, is still the best biography, and one of the best books on the Nazi phenomenon in general. Only a very few other works come to ...”

“... Cabinet, which was where Dawson, the villain of this book, went wrong. Dawson intrigued to unseat Edward VIII (a good thing, as it happened, but none of his business) and was the architect of his newspaper’s appeasement-of-Hitler policy, his belief being that the Empire, in which he took an obsessive interest, was not at that stage fully behind ...”

“... the quality of his love. It was a quality that had changed with the passing of time. As Constable said, Rubens ‘delighted in phenomena; – rainbows upon a stormy sky, – bursts of sunshine, – moonlight, – meteors, – and impetuous torrents mingling their sound with wind and wave’. The words are like a description of Flood Landscape with Philemon ...”

“... as it puts in, and if you add the contribution to tourism it makes a good profit. Yet Lord Gowrie said that if people made tax-exempt charitable contributions to the arts under the 1986 Finance Act he would recoup the lost tax by reducing the Council grant. He preferred sponsorship, not mentioning that half the costs of sponsorship come from the public ...”

“... The Middle Years (6-9), and The Late Years (9 to 11). Its major episodes – the encounter with Edward Penn, aged seven, muralist; Edwin’s doomed love for the sullen Rose Dorn, third-grade femme fatale; Rose’s fiery end; the improbable friendship with Arnold Hasselstrom, inarticulate playground psychopath; the romantically tortured genesis of ...”

“... affect human appearance, behaviour and quality of mind; it was only in the temperate zones, he said, that ‘we find fertility and agile minds, an agreeable activity in external manners, and a delicate sensibility in pleasures.’ Two contributors turned to humoral theories. One maintained that ‘Negroes are of a very dry temperament’; the other ...”

“... boosted in their inimitable manner,’ Bigland wrote, ‘and when you have met such a man have said to yourself, “Well, where is his cleverness? I could beat him myself!”’ He resolved to do so.Metropolitan Police records released by the National Archives over the last decade enable us to fill in some of the details of the case. The police, it turns ...”

“... is less a reflection of how real people speak than how they should. (This is sometimes said as a criticism of Moore, but it shouldn’t be. For readers who prefer their narrators to be drearily realistic mediocrities, there are plenty of novels to choose from.) What Tassie most has in common with her creator is a hyper-awareness of the way words ...”

“... witch’s oven and the ovens of the concentration camps are conflated. ‘Get in,’ the woman said. Hansel stood for a moment, and saw his sister’s hair lying on the kitchen floor, beside her neatly folded clothes. Then, without another word, he bent over and climbed into the oven, and the woman shut the iron door, and fastened the bolt. Corrie will ...”

“... experienced traveller. Also in the English party was the embassy chaplain, a young man called Edward Terry. Years later, Terry published a memoir of his Indian travels, and this obscure volume – A Voyage to East India (1655) – contains almost the only information we have about Coryate’s last months. Coryate was by then in his early forties, but his ...”

“... with a cat on his knee, and that I marched awkwardly into the room, stood on the hearthrug and said ‘I’m Bennett’, at which he laughed. And the laughter and the angle of his head and the smile that was so often in his eyes is how I recall him now. Freesias bring him back, too, as there were always some in a glass scenting the whole room, with its ...”

“... with the world. For a long time Modotti’s reputation was overshadowed by that of her mentor Edward Weston, and her total output of photographs was slender: four hundred images, Margaret Hooks says. But her well-known Roses (1925) sold at Sotheby’s in 1991 for $165,000, then apparently a record price for a photograph. And now here are two illustrated ...”

“... at last they allowed themselves to break up (‘I’m not a Beatle any more!’ George Harrison is said to have cried delightedly after their last public appearance), and left one wondering how they had managed to stay together so long. Dick Heckstall-Smith defines a band as ‘a passengerless collective’, but he doesn’t say ‘driverless’, and his often ...”